What a demoralising (and grossly incorrect) way to look at work.
If your work can be reduced to such an API, then I'd argue that you can be replaced with a script. Most jobs, however, even today, are far more complex than that. As a very obvious example, culture is an extremely important aspect of building a successful business, and a person's contribution to culture is irreducibly complex and unmeasurable, and untameable to stating an API type contract.
I meant the remote worker builds and maintains an API, not that he himself is an API.
> culture is an extremely important aspect of building a successful business
Yes, maybe; but there are many businesses that are already built and that would benefit from treating some parts of their process as self-enclosed APIs.
I would go so far as saying many already do, without knowing it.
That only works if you can separate responsibility out to the extent that each person is responsible for a specific area of the code and works only on their designated area.
What happens in practise is that a feature or bugfix might require a large change to one part of the code and a much smaller change in another.
So the developer tasked with the small change will finish before the other. Now you have an idle developer and an overloaded developer holding the process up. If you have a process whereby the idle developer can't share some of the workload of the other you are going to have very inefficient development.
You also run into problems if one developer is on holiday , off sick or leaves the company since nobody else has ever looked at their code.
There's also a risk of bringing politics into re-factoring decisions. "This functionality should be part of your API".
If your work can be reduced to such an API, then I'd argue that you can be replaced with a script. Most jobs, however, even today, are far more complex than that. As a very obvious example, culture is an extremely important aspect of building a successful business, and a person's contribution to culture is irreducibly complex and unmeasurable, and untameable to stating an API type contract.